News resources

One problem with reading news online today is that browsing can be really slow. A media-rich page loads dozens of files and can take as much as 10 seconds to load over broadband, which can be frustrating. What we need instead is a way to flip through articles really fast without unnatural delays, just as we can in print. The flow should feel seamless and let you rapidly flip forward to the content you like, without the constant wait for things to load. Imagine taking 10 seconds to turn the page of a print magazine!

Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting. At the same time, we provide aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with your friends and community. Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like. In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is serendipitous and personalized.

NewsExplorer produces its results fully automatically every day, by applying a combination of various multilingual Language Technology tools to the news articles gathered automatically by the Europe Media Monitor EMM. NewsExplorer carries out the following tasks:

cluster all news articles of the day, separately for each language, into groups of related articles;

for each cluster, identify names of people, places, organisations;

apply approximate name matching techniques to all names found in the same cluster, in order to identify which name variants may belong to the same person;

link the monolingual clusters with the related clusters in the other languages;

identify the most typical article of each cluster and use its title for the cluster;

store the extracted information in a database, learning more about each person, etc. every day;

occasionally, the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia is automatically searched for images and for further multilingual name variants.

Spectra merges the news spectrum and the color spectrum into an expansive news viewing experience. With comprehensive live news coverage, striking design, complete customization, dynamic browsing, human body interaction and many other unique features, Spectra brings A Fuller Spectrum of News to life in our most immersive extension yet.

"Off-Mic" goes behind the scenes at RFE/RL, featuring interviews with our journalists, photos, videos, and anything else that sheds light on how we cover the news in some of the most authoritarian countries on earth.